OPINION • Jul 09, 2020
The biggest news I heard this year....
Biggest… Or perhaps the most impactful news this year…
Sorry, Not about COVID…
HUL is renaming their face cream range – From Fair and lovely (And Fair and Handsome) to Glow and lovely (and handsome).
Seems like a Trivial thing, right?? I don’t think so. To be clear, HUL is no saint, even though doing this might undermine their sales. They had to do It because they don’t want their company on the wrong side of the #Blacklivesmatter movement. It’s not just HUL, Garnier and L’Oréal also have pledged to remove the word “white” from their face-cream and face-wash range. Johnson and Johnson even went so far to stop selling them in India. Even matrimony sites -after severe criticism and petitions- have removed skin color filter.
To understand the importance of this, think about what the words “Fair and lovely” (Handsome too) implies… It means Fair (light in color) “EQUALS” lovely and handsome and it also implies the opposite is also true. Think how derogatory this is of dark-skinned people (like me…). They were so good at making people uncomfortable in their own skin without alienating people, which would compromise their sales.
Despite all this, how those products managed to sell like hotcakes, and those companies thrive, without any opposition from the public? Truth is, Colourism is so deeply entrenched in Indian minds and this is prejudice not just in the minds of light-skinned people… To clear things out, what’s happening here is much different (completely unrelated) to what happens in western countries. That’s Racism (more on it later).
I was reading the biography of our former beloved president Abdul Kalam, and I found a quote that makes sense on multiple levels. And I quote
“To the untrained eye, we (Indians) may appear colorful and picturesque; to the critical eye, we are just shoddy imitations of our masters.”
Let’s get into some background to understand this…
First Science…
To all those morons who don’t know - Or chose to ignore- it yet, Skin color is an EVOLUTIONARY ADAPTATION. I don’t have to talk about this a lot (I have attached links to a good explanation of this evolution), What I will say is, Dark-skinned people can withstand UV rays of the sun better and Light-skinned people can collect Vitamin D even in places where Sunlight is scarce (Northern European and polar regions). The Opposite is also true, Dark-skinned people’s bones and muscles will weaken significantly in Northern (Sunlight-scarce) regions and Light-skinned people are at high risk of burnt skin and skin cancer in high-intensity sunlight. There is no inferiority or superiority here. Period. Different people coming in different colors are no different than different dogs or cats or birds coming in different colors.
Then History…
I don’t know you remember this from your history classes or not, Until Aryans (light-skinned people) came into India, about 3500 years, Indians (Dravidians) were predominantly dark. As you can see now, Indians come in shades of colors; Implication, there were not a lot of prejudices in intermixing (At least in south India). You can infer there was no colorism.
I think the problem started with the British… you know what their color superiority belief is based on…. According to the Bible, those guys are not supposed to do slavery, but they have very high business incentives to do so. So, they promulgated that African people were… lesser people and it was their religious doctrine and propaganda (For Business interests). How baseless and Ill-Intentioned. This is why racism is still prevalent today.
And this is where the Kalam quote comes in. “We are just shoddy imitations of our masters”. Since those guys are gone, lighter-skinned started to think themselves as… something closer to the British people. That is what, I think, is the basis for this SUPERIORITY COMPLEX and prejudice.
And this is perpetuated the same way every superstition and other senseless bullshits are perpetuated… from generation to generation, from parents to their children and only exacerbated by the proliferation of media.
I think colorism in the media had a lot to do with prejudiced technology. The Black and White camera. Those cameras were awful in capturing faces of dark-skinned people. Even fair-skinned people have to be “painted” with multiple coats before standing in front of the camera. You cannot go against technology here since that’s how technology grows. They have weaknesses and they are mitigated in the next generations. Started out as a necessity, now it is completely biased. Trust me… The success of Rajinikanth is a one in million cosmic fluke. He would never have made it into the industry if it wasn’t for luck. And if not for him, every film protagonist would have been as white as MGR. If you need proof, look at all the other south Indian film industries (Malayalam, Kannada, Telugu). Even in the Tamil industry, despite the unprecedented success of Rajinikanth, there are only a handful of dark-skinned protagonists (Say, Vijay Sethupati for one). The worst thing here is not the absence of dark-skinned people in the industry, but the unjust relegation to comedy (Who makes a fool of himself to make a joke) and villain’s backdrop roles (adiaalunga). Make no mistake, I respect comedy actors (Vadivelu for one), I suppose everyone is a fan of them, but people don’t look up to comedians.
I have no words to say for women in movies, it is the fucking worst. If you are born with dark skin then you are blacklisted by birth. I don’t presume to know what it feels, but think how alienated you would feel if no one you see on the big screen (or the small screen) looks like you. The darkest actresses I ever saw was Aishwarya Rajesh, who isn’t even halfway in the skin color spectrum. I don’t want to talk about this anymore, because I have nothing but contempt for this bullshit. All the qualifications you need to have to be an actress is being "white" and "cute", and I have no respect for people who make their living out of luck (getting the right face and body is luck), instead of out of what they earned.
Movies are fine, but why the fuck when I am studying the history of Tamil kingdoms, I am seeing all these white faces. Yes, we don’t have any images of those historic kings and most of what we see in history books are artistic renditions made recently. I am almost certain that the odds of Chera, Chozha, and Pandya kings being white are overwhelmingly low, yet every rendition I saw on my 6th and 7th std social books depict them as fair-colored people. If we don’t have a lot of information on how they looked, why painting them all white? All the Tamil poets are fair-skinned, I don’t know whether this bull shit is even statistically possible? South India supposed to be a predominantly “dark-skin” place. For proof, look at tomorrow's newspaper weather column.
I don’t for one second, believe that when most Hindu gods look like humans (Fair complexion), why the fuck is Lord Siva, Rama, Krishna and Vishnu depicted in fucking sky-blue color. Even in my home, we have photos of these gods depicted in Blue color, it is fucking stupid, every time I see it, I wanted to throw it out of the window. Embedded Institutionalized colorism at its most powerful place. I don’t know whether it is some North Indian conspiracy or whatever, but it is derogatory and cheap as shit.
Few of you know the feeling of having not a lot of great people to look up, who looks like you. Even America, who we all perceive as a racist country, don’t willingly do this to their next generations, like the way we do. They have the likes of Obama, Will Smith, Michael Jordan, Martin Luther King, etc, etc. They are not the racist and white supremacist country. We are.
What I just said is captured well in a few scenes in the movie “Shivaji”. There is a scene in that movie in which Shreya is depicted as “colorist” when she asks Rajini to put his hand side to side of her hand (You know, back then, It was a fashionable way of telling “I am superior to you!!”). But no one cared about the scenes where Rajini was depicted as an outright colorist. For one, He falls for a white-skinned girl (There is nothing wrong in that), but after seeing multiple slightly darker-skinned girls. Another scene is at the home of Solomon Pappaiah. The fact that no one even cared about it literally means everyone believes Light-skin is superior to dark skin.
The common solution to this that I have grown up hearing is “If people are making fun of you, instead of whining, prove them fucking wrong” and I prove them wrong, if not, I will prove them soon. And that is the way I am, but it is never the solution.
One possible ramification of this embedded colorism which I have observed is “Economic Disparity”. Speculation warning – what I am about to say is complete speculation, I have no statistical basis for it. A light-skinned guy almost never marries a dark-skinned girl unless he is a useless and poor piece of shit and Almost every financially successful (Or inherited) Dark-skinned guy always marries a light-skinned girl. What happens generation after generation is that the economic gap grows year on year. Honestly, I am lucky (Statistically) to be where I am today- My dad worked so hard for us. If you want proof, go to a nearby government school and a rich school (Like DAV). Very soon, it will be like (Statistically) dark-skinned people are poor, dumb, and lazy.
Unlike racism in western countries, we won’t even acknowledge this problem, because face the truth, we all deep down believe dark skin is really inferior to fair skin. This is not just the light-skinned people believing this. Because no company or secret organization or whatever can manage to create this prejudice on a billion people. I had a grandfather who used fair and lovely cream every day for 30 years despite being rich- Make no mistake, he was a great man, I respect him. I am no saint; I have thought a lot (a real lot) of times that I would be better off if I was fair-skinned. If I am to give examples, I can do it all day, but that’s not the point.
I suppose some of you get why I get emotional about this topic. I have seen and heard a lot. A lot of seemingly innocuous comments are based on really deep and embedded beliefs, I don’t know how kids of 6 or 7 years come to believe these things unless taught either implicitly or explicitly by their parents. You know, I have seen directly parents abetting and joining in on this. What I am trying to say here is that the inferiority complex of dark-skinned people is equally responsible as the condescending behavior of fair-skinned people for the prevalence and persistence of colorism.
I don’t know, whether the cinema industry or beauty industry or whatever it is are going to change. What I know is that entire generations are shot with this plague and no one even seems to acknowledge it as a problem (they believe it is true). I know just a few people are going to be reading this article and even fewer will think about it, but any change, however small it is, is a huge step forward. Acknowledgment is the first step for eradicating any problem.
Skin color evolution article
https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/why-did-darker-and-lighter-human-skin-colors-evolve